I lived in the projects untill I was ten. We had alot of silly tales our parents would tell us. Some I suppose were based on fact and some on predjudice maybe??

This one sticks out most in my mind.....

If you didn't close and lock your windows at night, NINJAS would come into your house and kill you. Ninja stars, samaurai swords and the whole bit. You had to be especially scared on the second floor because DUH....ninjas can, and obviously prefer to, scale walls,....hello?? You have no idea how many hot summer nights I slept through with the windows closed![smiley=cwm2.gif] Now that I'm older and maybe a little bit wiser, : I can see where this came from. It may not have been our parents as much as peers. When I was a kid, my city, which is in the metro Boston area, recieved a HUGE influx of Cambodian immigrants. I think that the ninja rumors basically stemmed from ignorance and misunderstanding of thier culture which was working its way into our neighborhoods. It's pretty amusing on afterthought though, and the kids I grew up with and I still joke about it. The other rumor we literally suffered through was the BLACK VAN. This black van had no windows and would drive the streets and grab up lone children to perform any number of horrible inexplicable acts upon them. (NO Nintendo for a month!! AHH!) Obviously this one was meant to keep us off the streets, but I think that there is some truth to this one. Actually I think that many neighborhoods filled with children have experienced this.

I'm not sure if these can completely be catorigized into the "Urban Legends" group, but I think any group of kids growing up together has them. Anyone else have any??? ???

"Science without Religion is lame, Religion without Science is Blind." -Albert Einstein

Our van was white. Of course, I do think it stemmed from an actual occurance of some poor child being abducted by a man in a white van, but I was all of in my 20's before I got over my fear of all white vans.